We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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A kind reader sent in a link to the debate on ID cards that took place yesterday in the House of Commons. Judge for yourselves:
Mr. Simon Thomas (Ceredigion): Let me say at the outset that I am opposed to ID cards, both in principle and on grounds of practicality. To put it at its most brutal, I do not believe that the best way of remembering, as we do this week, those who gave their lives for freedom is to introduce the sort of society that would have had Saddam Hussein drooling. The apparatus of totalitarian repression depends on knowing who and where every citizen is and was, and which God they worship. The Government may have dropped the God bit, but the potential for all the rest remains.
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At the moment, we balance privilege with responsibility. It is a privilege to drive a car, and it is a responsibility to pass a test, hold a driving licence, tax a vehicle and so on. It is a privilege to enter another country, but a passport is needed. Other forms of identity, including credit cards, party membership cards such as my Plaid Cymru card and parliamentary photo passes, are mere conveniences that we can opt to use. An ID card system tips that scale and reduces citizen to cipher. It forgets that the Government should be subject to the people and instead makes the people subject to the Government. The central tenet of freedom—for people to be able to move around as they please, live where they please and do want they want, as long as they do not harm others—is reduced to a nannying, bullying attitude that the Government must know where people are and what they are doing.
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I would like to tackle the Government’s arguments head on. However, as I said earlier, the Government have not presented a unified argument in their discussion of a national ID card. They have been as convincing as they have been consistent. We were told first that ID cards would deter international terrorism and political violence; next that they would enable the Government to end benefit fraud; and then that they were the panacea that would stop illegal immigration, asylum troubles and illegal working in the UK. The Labour Government, much like the Tory Government in 1995, have used any justification for the introduction of ID cards. It is a clear example of a solution in search of a problem.
Hear, hear, hon. Ladies and Gentlemen. It is worth reading the whole thing.
In contemplating where things stand regarding the threat of terror attacks on our homes from radical islamic groups, we have tended, perhaps understanderbly, to overlook sources of trouble closer to home. An article
in the wonderfully revamped website of the American Spectator, a conservative leaning journal, describes the aims and methods of extremist environmental groups. It makes for worrying reading.
Like their better-known terrorist brethren who hate America and its capitalist system, ELF undertakes actions it knows will have no direct consequence beneficial to its stated goals. It merely looks to inflict harm, hoping that will cow people into living in teepees and biking to work. ELF members are sustained by hate against infidels who don’t share their extremist religion, and are eager to commit violence against their “enemies.” So far that violence has been targeted against property, but as the more radical members come to realize that burning down a few houses and vandalizing SUVs aren’t accomplishing anything, and fueled by their demonizing rhetoric, violence against people is not far off.
There is no great surprise in this. Witness what happened to the staff working for the Huntingdon Life Sciences business. Witness the constant vandalism of genetically modified crops. If you are in the grip of an ideology that holds “nature” and its creatures as inviolable, and believe that all sentient creatures have “rights” then it is perhaps inevitable that some folk are going to resort to physical violence to get their way.
As Virginia Postrel noted on her blog some time ago (cannot find the exact article, I am afraid), we need to hear from mainstream green lobbies about how much they deplore violent acts. So far, I have heard diddely squat from any such group on this matter.
I do not believe I am being hysterical in suggesting that it is only a matter of time before quite a few folk are going to get killed by enviro-nuts. There is not much we ourselves can do apart from show vigilance. However, what we can and must do is to constantly challenge their ideology and continue to champion the achievements of reason, science and technology that have lifted us up from the swamps. These nutters would have us return whence we came.
For as long as Marxists continue to evade responsibility for the atrocities that their own atrocious opinions unleashed upon this planet during the twentieth century, then for so long will be necessary and desirable for anti-Marxists to go on attacking Marxism. For as long as it is seriously being argued that Marxism was innocent, or worse, that it should even be encouraged to rise again from its grave, then the rest of us should continue to stamp on that grave.
One of the best such stampings I’ve recently read – although it is more of an elegant and civilised application of the light roller, as if at a cricket match – is a piece by Anthony Daniels in the October 2003 edition of New Criterion, entitled History by other means.
His reflections are provoked by a trip to Cambodia, and by the uneasy feeling that all that charm and grace might merely be a mask for the horrors that erupted during the ghastly reign of Pol Pot. He reflects upon a writer called Vickery, who plays down the Marxist aspect of what happened in Cambodia, and plays up the Cambodian aspect of it all he can. → Continue reading: Nothing to do with ideology?
Tony Blair’s official spokesman has made an announcement about Big Blunkett’s plans to introduce compulsory national Identity Cards for innocent British citizens. The statement is confusing and seems to be an attempt to patch over the splits in Cabinet.
According to the statement, Ministers have agreed in principle that there would be major benefits to such a scheme. However they have also agreed that the practical issues are immense. Of perhaps most interest is this sentence:
We will legislate to enable the scheme to be introduced and plan on the basis that all the practical problems can be overcome but we will reserve the final decision on a move to compulsion until later this decade.
That could be seen as a victory for either side.
So long as this enabling legislation is in place the threat of compulsory National Identity Cards will remain. We must make it clear to the government that proceeding any further down this road will lose them the next election.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
The Cabinet domestic affairs sub-committee met yesterday to consider Big Blunkett’s plans to introduce compulsory national Identity Cards for innocent British citizens.
The plan has split the Cabinet with Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and Patricia Hewitt said to be amongst those opposing Blunkett.
According to reports in today’s media, the meeting was “acrimonious”, “savage” and a “bloodbath”.
Incidentally, the BBC have launched a new website iCan for campaigners. If it takes off, it could generate a lot of exposure. I’ve started a campaign against ID cards.
Partially cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Today my salary appeared in my bank account. I am definitely happier than I was yesterday, when my bank account contained a very little indeed. The conventional wisdom is that I should not be happier. “Money does not make you happier,” the anti-progress crowd say.
But if that were true, then Africans who get clean water for the first time are not any happier than when their children were dying from disease. OK, maybe the anti-progressites merely mean that once you get to a certain basic income, earning any more from that point does not make you happier. Really?
Let’s take a young family who pay fees to send their children to school. It is a bit of a struggle paying the fees. If they had a bit more money, they would not have to worry about it. Would that do nothing for their happiness? Or let’s say environmentalists had their way and they had less money. The fees would become much more of a burden. Surely that would make them less happy?
This may seem a minor thing. Two Florida student organizations faced the possibility their floats might not be allowed to take part in this year’s Homecoming Parade.
It is not as if they were Animal House’s. One was a Young Republican group with a toppleable statue of Saddam Hussein. The others were Christian students with Jesus as their co-pilot… or at least their float topping.
So did they accept the requirements of Political Correctness and go meekly to their re-education in Cultural Sensitivity? Did they demonstrate and block the street to the school? Spray paint red liberation slogans on the school windows?
Nope. They called the Orlando based Liberty Council and threatened the school with a law suit.
Saddam will be toppling and Jesus saving at the Philips High School Homecoming Parade, as scheduled.
Freedom Is For Everyone.
Adelaide is swathed with security cameras that observe comings and goings in the Adelaide CBD.
The local police love this and are boasting about how well it is going.
The company in charge of the cameras is well pleased as well, and are so pleased that they are providing live feeds from the cameras on their website. They have had the good grace to omit a privacy policy. After all, that would be a bad joke.
Sean Gabb comments on the Conservative leadership switch in his latest issue of Free Life Commentary. So far, it’s just an email and that link doesn’t now work, but it will soon.
He starts by saying nice things about Michael Howard, and notes that he said much nastier things in the past. But since Sean now really hates the government, whatever has to be, in the matter of who has to be the Leader of the Opposition, has to be. At least he’s better than Iain Duncan Smith.
But how come, he asks, the Conservatives have suddenly had this collective fit of effectiveness?
But the question remains how did they do it? For the past six years, I have watched from an advantaged view as the Parliamentary Conservative Party ran about like terrified sheep in the dark. How have they managed this coup so quickly and so well? The simplest explanation is to say that enough of them saw the possibility of losing their seats at the next election and that desperation supplied the lack of courage and imagination. I like to believe, however, in a more complex explanation. Mine is not a standard conspiracy theory, as I claim little prior evidence in it support. Instead, I reason back from perceived effects to possible causes. It may be entirely false, but it pleases me to entertain it. Here it goes.
As said, this is not an ordinary Labour Government, but something of wonderful malevolence. It does not so much want to change the running of the country as to destroy it. There is the continued sapping of the Monarchy – the threatened removal of royal powers, and the degradation of Her Majesty from our Head of State to citizen of a United States of Europe. There is the determination to outlaw hunting and to destroy farming and to remove all the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. There is the progressive hobbling of the City financial institutions with European levels of tax and regulation. There is the use of the armed forces as American mercenaries – and without any advantage gained in return. There is the possible murder and undoubtedly the forced suicide of someone senior in the foreign policy and intelligence establishment. The remnants of the Old Order may finally have realised that there is no compromise on offer from this Government, and now may be doing something about it. The Monarchy, the landed and mercantile interests, and the security services – these are even now a formidable combination. Perhaps 1688 is finally come again. Then, an alarmed old order realised the nature of its enemy and took up the cause of an aroused but leaderless nation. Perhaps Mr Blair is to play the role of James II, and Mr Howard of Prince William.
Is there any truth in this? Or am I just an old romantic? We shall see.
Some but not much. Yes you are. And I believe we can already see. → Continue reading: Michael Howard and the Conservative opportunity
What is the world coming to!
A French hunter was shot by his dog after he left a loaded shotgun in the boot of his car with two dogs and one of the animals accidentally stepped on the trigger, police say.
The man, from the village of Espelette in the Basque region, was admitted to hospital in the nearby town of Bayonne on Monday with leadshot injuries to the hip.
“As he was driving along, one of his dogs accidentally set off the gun,” a police official said on Wednesday.
I didn’t know it was loaded, okay?
It is hard to know what to make of this:
Gordon Brown celebrated his return to politics yesterday by firing a shot across the bows both of Brussels and Tony Blair. Perhaps the Chancellor has found the time while on paternity leave to read the 250 pages of the draft European constitution. Mr Brown evidently does not agree with his neighbour in Number 10 that the constitution is a mere “tidying-up exercise”. On the contrary, he is obviously alarmed by the text agreed by the constitutional convention, which extends EU competence into areas of economic policy hitherto jealously guarded by the Treasury.
The only thing I am sure of is that it does not mean exactly what it says. My tentative take on it is not that Brown dislikes a regulated economy/society per se, but rather than he insists on being the one doing the regulating. The guy is hardly a free market capitalist after all and neither is he much of a nationalist. Maybe he feels that as Kinnock already has his snout highly placed in the EU’s trough, there will not be room enough for another ‘big beast’ such as himself and thus he is stuck with maintaining his looting rights via obsolescent old Westminster.
Alternatively, could it is just a ploy to demonstrate that there is a ‘vibrant Euro-sceptic wing in the Labour Party’ and thus forestall natural Labour supporters from feeling they have to vote a revitalised (ha!) Tory Party under Count Drac… Michael Howard, given that Brown is making it clear that “Labour is not entirely in the pocket of Brussels”. Are Labour’s strategists really that clever though? Not sure.
Cynical? Moi?
It had to happen:
Undercover Agents Talking To Each Other In ‘Under 12’ Chatroom
WASHINGTON, DC—In an effort to weed out pedophiles, two FBI agents, identified only as “Cutiepie1994” and “KoalaLover,” unknowingly communicated with one another in the under-12 chat room of TweenTalk.com for almost two hours Tuesday. “You should see me in my new bathing suit. It’s really rad,” Cutiepie wrote. “Kewl. Guess what? My parents aren’t home right now,” KoalaLover responded. Two minutes after their lengthy Internet conversation ended, KoalaLover unknowingly passed Cutiepie on the way into the bathroom.
Well, it probably will happen, assuming life imitates Onion.
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